Identifying Your Video Target Audience

It is proven that video is the most effective way to engage your audience. Statistics show that video increases email click through rates, inquiries, website visits and product purchases. You know you should be making video as a part of your online marketing strategy, but where do you even start? First things first, identify your target audience. If you don’t have any idea of who your audience is, you won’t know what message will resonate with them best.

Here are our top 6 tips for identifying your videotarget audience.

1.Don’t assume anything.

This is the most important step. Challenging your assumptions canhelp you to redefine your video target audience. It’s time to forget your idea of what you think your audience looks like and find more evidence to back up your claim.

Start doing some secondary market research by reading up on case studies and examples from industry reporters who have come before you. Look to your competitors, they may have already done similar market research and put it into action.

2.Create your audience persona

An audience persona outlines the traits that the typical member ofyour target audience possesses. Your buyer persona could include information about customer characteristics and buying situations.

3.Conduct quantitative surveys

Now that you have a rough idea of your video target audience and their persona, it’s time to conduct your own primary research. Start with large-scale quantitative surveys that ask closed-end questions about specific to your brand and product.

Questions could include “How important is X to you?” or “What is your biggest consideration when purchasing X?” This can be conducted face-to-face, or via email, mail, telephone, on your website or social media. If the response rate is high enough, these results can be used to generalise the behaviour to the entire population. However it is recommended to also do the next step…

4. Conduct qualitative surveys

While quantitative surveys are great for collecting objective data, qualitative surveys can complement your research and provide moredetailed insights into your target market’s psychological makeup.

These surveys should target a small group of people and use open ended questions to invite longer responses that you can interpret, e.g. “What do you like best about X?”. Keep your questions short and avoid asking two questions in one to get the best answers.

5. Listen to social media

Find out what topics are trending amongst your video target audience. Analyse who they interact with and listen to what they say online. A good starting place is to look at your competitors and see how they interact withyour target market.

Use a platform like Hootsuite and Facebook Analytics to monitor all social interactions with your brand, and use Google Analytics to track behaviour on your website.

6. See the results

YouTube and Facebook provide great tools to monitor the engagement with your video. Look at the analytics to understand who is watching your videos, how long they stay tuned in for, and the amount of engagement your video recieves.

Engagement can be measured by the number of shares, likes, comments and follows. Facebook Live videos allow you to see exactly what points of the video recieve the most engagment, so take advantage of this. Learn from these statistics and tailor your next video depending on the results.

Collecting data in these ways can help you to better understand your target market. While none of these methods individually give you a clear portrait, using all of these tips in combination will provide the most comprehensive vision into your target market. From there, you will be better equipped to tailor your messages within your videos and subsequently make your videos more appealing to your audience.